Applications or “apps” have been developed over the last 12-24 months that are designed to work on smart phones, iPads or other tablet computers and other related or similar devices. These apps run the gambit from being purely entertaining, such as games, to being completely useful for the user, such as the new IRS app designed to provide information about the user's tax returns and tax refund. Apps are designed, ultimately, to provide the user with untethered access to any number of sites, games and social media applications on the go and without logging on to a conventional computer or laptop computer.
Another development over the last 12-24 months is the rise of social media. From Facebook.com to Twitter.com, social media has exploded in both scope and use and these sites consistently have hundreds of millions of users on a daily basis. Social media sites allow people to connect to friends, colleagues, businesses, along with providing information about what they are buying, watching, listening to, eating and drinking. These sites are a major step forward for multi-layered communications and monitoring consumer preferences.
Some social media applications only require the user to enter the stream of conversation—such as Twitter.com. Once the user sets up a user ID and password, the user can post, follow others, “retweet” and reply to all of the posts. Unlike Facebook.com, there is no additional layer of privacy where you are only allowed to “tweet” to your friends and contacts and read “tweets” from your friends and contacts. Twitter.com is one example of an open network of groups of users who use hash tags (“#”) to identify subject areas and subject matter to group conversations for users. For example, Twitter.com users who want to follow the conversations going on about the uprising in Egypt just needs to go to #Egypt to see the collection of tweets, since the hash tag was formed. In these instances, however, you are depending on the users who came before you to use the hash tag convention in their tweets.
There are other social media websites and there will be new ones developed that are much like Twitter.com, in that they don't limit the user to a predetermined group of friends and contacts, but instead allow the conversations to occur organically between groups of people who want to share ideas and discuss topics that are common to that group of people.
To that end, it would be ideal to develop a new application or “app” that connects users who are discussing similar topics without the need for conventions that are used at a particular site, such as hash tags and Twitter.com. In addition, it would be ideal if this application was able to connect users with one another across various social media sites, so that the user doesn't have to jump from site to site. This type of application will be beneficial, in that it will introduce users to new websites and social media outlets, which could be beneficial for these sites and their advertisers.